Plato's Stepchildren: Persuasion
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: Spock/Chapel. Mature Content. What really happened on Plato and afterwards. Rated 18 for graphic non-consensual m/m and m/f sex.
1. Part I

Warnings:

Rated 18

Spock/Chapel

Contains graphic non-consensual m/m and m/f sex

I.

'How can you let this go on?'

Parmen's words echoed through Dr McCoy's mind. They circled in it like hungry dogs, they snapped at him and worried him and dragged at the tatters of his attention. And he welcomed them, embraced them even, because they stopped him seeing what he did not want to see, and hear what he did not want to hear. Spock, weeping artificial tears at the side of the room. Kirk, prancing as if he was playing a childhood game of horse and rider – except for the fact that the child on his back was an adult man, and he was indulging in no game.

Finally Parmen dropped Kirk, exhausted, at the side of the room, and the captain slumped like a rag doll. Alexander moved stiffly away, looking mortified, a child who had suddenly witnessed his parents in their worst excesses. Kirk straightened himself up, moving stiffly, going to where Spock sat on the steps to the pool. He met Spock's eyes with a dignity that Spock could only admire.

'Mr Spock,' he said softly. 'Are you all right?'

Spock nodded, unable to speak as he wrestled to control the raging emotions that Parmen had kindled in him. Parmen had shown himself to be quite adept at not only controlling movements, but also feelings and reactions, and the grief that he had experienced still felt very real.

Free of Parmen's control, at least for now, he rose to his feet and stood beside his captain, holding his own dignity around himself like a cloak with a broken hasp

'Are you – quite finished?' Kirk asked directly of Parmen.

Parmen glanced sideways at McCoy.

'Will you order the good doctor to stay?'

'I will order the good doctor to leave,' Kirk said in a level tone, his fury evident in the very steadiness of his voice. 'I will order the good doctor to take all of our lives before he stoops to serve you. Bones,' he said softly.

McCoy looked at Parmen and Philana with ill-disguised hatred, then got to his feet and went to stand alongside Spock and the captain, resolute in his loyalty.

Parmen smiled.

'I am two and a half thousand years old, Captain. I have all the time in the world. And I won't permit you to commit suicide. But don't worry,' he said quickly. 'I think we'll be able to change your minds before your natural life span runs its course.'

'What more can you do, Parmen?' Spock asked, glad that his voice was now steady after the emotional trauma that Parmen had forced upon him.

'There are a couple more – avenues – at my disposal,' Parmen said sleekly.

Normally Spock's eyebrow would have rose, but after all that had occurred his countenance was set in stone.

'I would be interested to know their nature,' he said.

McCoy shot him a censorious look. Parmen merely smiled again.

'I can look into your minds. I can read your hopes and fears like a book. I know that the good Dr McCoy here is a compassionate soul, and is most easily persuaded by witnessing suffering. Your Captain Kirk is proud, and what he hates most is to be humbled by those to whom he feels superior. You, my dear Spock, are private and intellectual. You shun the base, the physical – you are afraid of revealing your animal self.'

'You are speaking of psychology, Parmen,' Spock said steadily. 'Not telepathy.'

'Let us see the animal Spock,' Parmen continued. Spock's response was as unimportant to him as Spock himself was, except as a part in his play. 'Let us see the creature that lies beneath his trappings.'

Philana tittered, her hand over her mouth in an affectation of self-consciousness.

'Oh, dear Parmen,' she drawled. 'How could you tell I so wanted to see what the sprite-Vulcan was really like?'

Parmen glanced at her with a look of poorly repressed jealousy. Spock stood still, allowing himself to cling to a sense of superiority over this spoilt, uncontrolled, wilful pair. In many ways, they reminded him of children.

'Ah, there we are,' Parmen said, levelling his gaze at Spock.

Spock felt his blue uniform top begin to twitch, the hem of the garment beginning to snake up towards his ribs. He instinctively moved his hands to grab at the fabric – but Parmen grabbed at him instead with his mind, raising his arms relentlessly up above his head, peeling the shirt and the black undershirt off together in one fluid motion.

'Should we fold them, Parmen?' Philana asked in her lazy voice. 'Do you think a lack of neatness will distress him?'

With a flick of his hand, Parmen dropped the clothes unceremoniously on the floor. Spock stood frozen with his arms above his head, naked from the waist up, as Philana walked casually over to him. She sucked one of her fingers into her own mouth, wetting it in a way that she must have believed was seductive, before circling the digit about his nipple, watching the hair there cling to her finger.

Then McCoy growled, 'Leave him alone, goddammit.'

Spock closed his eyes briefly. While he hadn't forgotten of the presence of McCoy and the captain, or of Alexander either, he had been drawn forward to the raised plinth, and they were all behind him. At least when they were silent he could focus only on controlling his own internal reaction to what was occurring.

'He is pleasant, isn't he?' Philana said.

She moved her hand down to the fastening of his trousers, not bothering to touch it, but making the button and zipper slide down at her languid movements, and then mentally drawing down his trousers and underpants until he stood there, his trousers bunched around his knees, exposed to the view of all in the room.

'He's quite attractive, isn't he, darling?' Philana continued to needle her husband, causing Spock's boots and socks to slip away from him, and tossing the remainder of his clothing onto the crumpled pile at the side of the room.

Spock closed his eyes again. _*Control._* He had to control. Ignore the voices of his friends behind him. Ignore Parmen and Philana's teasing, malicious words. _*Control._*

He was powerless. All he had available to him was the capability of controlling his own thoughts. He could feel Philana's hands on him, touching him, trailing down his flanks, caressing his most intimate areas with precise cruelty. Her mind was inside him, permeating him like a virus, sparking reaction in him even as her physical fingers explored him.

_*Control._*

He stood rigid, trying to drag his mind away from the physical response that the teasing fingers of Philana's mind were forcing from his body. His blood-starved hands, still above his head, were beginning to tingle. He focussed on that tingling, felt every prick and stab – but another touch between his legs made him gasp involuntarily as Philana stroked her fingertips lightly over his scrotum.

Philana knelt before him, and he felt her breath hot over his stomach as she leant forward. Her finger trailing up the hardness of his erection, her mouth coming closer…

And then a rush of jealous anger broke his concentration and Philana's control simultaneously. Suddenly deprived of support he dropped to his knees, the hard stone floor jarring his kneecaps in a painful reality.

It was like suddenly being plunged into cold water. Free of all control, the colours in the room suddenly seemed garishly bright, the sound of his own panting loud and rasping in his ears. Had he really been fighting that hard? He was exhausted, and sharp pain pulsed in his knees.

He would have bruises there. That was good. Focus on pain, on the idea of kneecaps shattered on a cold stone floor. Anything but the insidious sensations in his groin and belly. Anything but the rearing erection that Philana had forced from him.

He looked up, and saw Parmen's eyes lit with a cold fury. Philana had desired him, and Parmen hated him for it.

And then Parmen's control clenched over him, ruthlessly locking every muscle. He was flung backwards until he was arched over, his knees still on the floor, his head almost touching the tiles behind him. For a moment, surreal and upsidedown, he saw Kirk, McCoy and Alexander, frozen in a bizarre diorama of emotion. Kirk's and McCoy's faces were contorted with anger, Alexander's crumpled in misery and pity. And then he was being flipped over again, so he was kneeling on all fours on the floor, his buttocks raised up and his head being drawn down to the ground.

_*No! No, no, no!_*

It did not take a superior intellect or a fine grasp of logic to understand what Parmen intended. He would punish Spock, and he would punish Philana, simultaneously.

Parmen's hands were on his sides, his fingers clenching hard into his skin and hipbones. There was no parody of seduction from him. He was not doing this out of any desire but the desire to hurt the Vulcan and incense his wife. There was no erotic preamble.

Parmen entered him with the swift, efficient thrust of a sword entering a combatant's ribcage. Pain skewered through his pelvis, and he cried out despite himself, his inarticulate scream sudden and horrifying in the silent room. He could not clench his hands or shut his eyes or bite his lip. Parmen's control was absolute.

He let the pain take over. Focus on that. Focus on pain. The spasming pain of cramping muscles. A strange, nerve tingling pain that manifested itself everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The pain in his throat from the screams that were forced from him each time Parmen entered. Just pain, hot and absorbing and comforting.

And in-built, automatic reactions came into force, taking the pain and separating the spreading, secondary wash of it from the precise, focussed centre of it, and suddenly he could _*feel_* Parmen again, thrusting into him, and inextricably link each glide and withdrawal with each spasm of his muscles, and he almost sobbed.

_*Damn_* Vulcan control. Damn Vulcan awareness. He did not _*need_* to be precisely aware of what was hurting him. He could do nothing about it. He wanted to feel the pain full through his body, and instincts learnt through decades of study and practice would not let him…

He could feel Parmen's pleasure now – his cold, malicious pleasure at defying Philana, and at bringing pain to Spock. He was very focussed. He was not lost in lust. He was controlling Spock precisely, and watching Philana all the while. Then Parmen's control gripped further around his body. Words were ground out of him.

'Oh, yes, Parmen. *_Yes*_, Parmen. Please. Harder. *_Harder*_,' and he was ramming himself back onto him, feeling the thick length of his shaft plunging deeper into him.

And then Parmen stilled, and in orgasm his rigid telekinetic control slipped, and Spock felt his back drop by inches like a collapsing bridge, and he could feel the jerking inside of him as Parmen jetted thick fluid into him.

He knelt there, immobile, feeling that thickness inside him, feeling the spasms of his own body as it attempted to reject the intrusion. And then Parmen gripped him again with his mind, withdrawing from him smoothly and rearranging his clothing. Spock knelt with his face on the floor, his breath coming in sharp gasps, feeling a trickle beginning down the back of his thigh, and he wanted to sob.

'You see, Philana,' Parmen said in a malicious tone, recovering his breath with effort. 'He never would have done for you, my dear.'

Philana's face was white and rigid with rage – but she controlled herself, pulling her sardonic smile back onto her face as she looked at Parmen.

'Oh, I don't see why we shouldn't share, dear husband,' she countered. 'After all, he might crave a more satisfying experience. I certainly know that I do.'

Fury tightened Parmen's features, and Spock suddenly found himself flung across the room like a discarded toy. He lay frozen, face down, so close on the edge of the pool that one hand was dangling in the water. He realised as he lay there that the only thing keeping him immobile now was his own horror.

Parmen strutted furiously out of the chamber, and Philana followed him, both of them arguing like children over who had broken their newest plaything. Silence dropped over the room.


	2. Part II

II.

No exertion of the Platonians could have frozen the room as effectively as what had just happened. Barely even a breath could be heard. It seemed as if time itself had stopped. At least, it would have seemed like that were it not for the regular throb of pain that Spock felt as his heart insisted on continuing to pump blood through his body. His own physicality was relentless…

Finally, someone moved.

'Spock…'

Kirk's voice was unbearably gentle, full of the horror and misery that Spock could not himself express. Jim's fingers were almost touching his shoulder, but he could not quite bring himself to make contact. Spock prayed that he wouldn't make contact…

And Jim touched him, and Spock's control snapped, and he lashed out, shouting something incoherent, and his fist made contact with solid flesh.

'Jim,' McCoy said after a long silence. 'You okay?'

The answer was wordless, but obviously affirmative, because McCoy said, 'Okay. But let him alone for a minute, Jim. He needs some time.'

Spock closed his eyes, struggling for control, struggling to compose his face into some kind of equanimity. He opened them again, focussing on the sharp edge of the stone where it plunged into the water pool. On the reflected light in the water. On the mathematical perfection of the columns that decorated this parody of a Greek civilisation. On the black and white and black and white and black and white of the gaming board that covered part of the floor.

He saw his clothes, and began, awkwardly, to stand. Now he realised that he was in severe pain, and that he needed desperately to wash away what Parmen had left in him and on him, and he sank back to the floor, pressing a palm to the coolness of the stone, trying desperately to let it steady him.

'No, Jim,' he heard McCoy mutter in a low voice – and then the doctor was beside him, with all of his doctor's solicitude, with the air of not being there even while he was there, that Spock could not quite quantify.

'Yes, that,' the doctor was saying. 'No, give it here. There, Spock. Do you need some help?'

And Spock realised that the doctor had thrust a wet cloth into his hands, and he looked down and saw with some irony a tatter of the perfectly arranged drapes from Parmen's couch, that McCoy had dipped into the pool for him.

He shook his head numbly, using the cloth to do what he could at wiping away the traces of Parmen's assault, and then he dropped it back into the water, and McCoy was helping him with expert, compassionate care to redon his clothing.

'Come on,' McCoy said gently. He had the diplomacy to not press Spock to talk about what had happened.

Spock stood, and winced. McCoy's hand was hovering a scant inch from his arm, ready to support him if it was needed.

'I am – all right,' he said.

His own voice shocked him. It was hoarse, and despite all of his efforts to control there was a decided tremor in it.

He walked with his small entourage back to their room. He did not speak, or move his eyes from dead centre. The pain, and the loose, damp feeling in his rectum, seemed to be all that he was composed of. There was nothing, he was nothing, but that feeling, that precarious sense of only just holding on…

Their room, at least, was equipped with every luxury that a guest of Parmen's would need. He went straight into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, shutting out the voices of the others. He sat down on the toilet, his face in his hands, finally able to expel the remainder of Parmen's seed from his body.

He sat there until he felt chilled, and then he rose, stiffly, and very deliberately ran over-hot water into the large, oblong bath, and sank himself into it up to the neck, and sat there. Words ran unbidden into his mind.

_*Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew_.*

He pressed his hands over his face again, shutting out the light, focussing only on the heat of the water surrounding him and the sting of pain where it washed into solid flesh rent by force, and he wished to melt into the water and disappear with it into whatever drainage system the Platonians favoured.

He straightened and opened his eyes, looking down at his distorted body through the water. He was inarguably solid. His stomach was creased where his body bent. His legs looked thin and pale and ineffectual, the feet floating at their ends like splayed, bleached leaves. The hair on his body was drifting and swirling in the water like seaweed. His hands seemed large and useless, hovering like pale fish.

He saw the faint swirl of green mixing with the clear water, and knew that Parmen had caused him to bleed, but at least not to bleed severely. This hot, stinging water was probably the best remedy. He washed methodically, drained the water, and dried himself thoroughly. He drew his uniform back on, feeling as if he was donning a form of armour with that familiar, neat, simple garb. He walked back into the main room, deliberately unreactive to the response of his friends, and sat with focus and deliberation on a low bench, steepling his hands in an attempt to recreate the process of meditation.

No one spoke to him. They watched him, followed him with their eyes as if he was an accident in progress. Alexander stood beside him, and Spock could feel the waves of compassion from his mind. Eventually McCoy came to crouch near him, scanning him and assuring himself of Spock's condition. The doctor stared at him closely for a few moments. Spock did not react, and McCoy moved away.

Alexander touched him, tentatively, softly, and a wave of emotion entered his perception. At least this time he had the control not to lash out at those who only wished him well. The anger spiked through him again, but he kept it invisible within the walls of his mind. _*Jim_*. He could have killed Jim when he had struck out at him, blindly and thoughtlessly, when Jim had been doing nothing but trying to comfort him.

He became aware of Kirk speaking. Jim had been lying on one of the couches in the room all the while, dealing with his own physical pain from Parmen's attention to him.

'Can you do anything for him?' Kirk asked in a low voice.

And McCoy replied, angered by his own inability to help, 'There is no medicine that can help him. He'll have to come through this himself.'

Spock heard Jim moving towards him. His stiffness and pain were evident in the halting sound of his footsteps.

Spock did not move, but he could see in his periphery Kirk standing beside him, looking down on him with overwhelming sympathy.

To forestall Jim's expected verbalisation of that sympathy, Spock said tonelessly, 'I trust they did not injure you too much, Captain.'

He moved no more of his body than those parts required to form words.

'My muscles are sore, that's all,' Jim said quickly.

Beneath those words Spock could intuit, *_Not as much as they injured you, Spock. I'm so sorry, Spock. Tell me how I can help you, Spock._*

'The humiliation must have been most difficult for you to bear,' Spock said in the same monotone. Then he added with a sudden hint of emotion, 'I can understand.'

'The release of emotions, Mr Spock, is what keeps us healthy,' McCoy said gently from behind him. 'Emotionally healthy, that is.'

_*What a useless platitude,_* Spock thought. _*McCoy, always attempting to heal with his human psychology what his concoctions and instruments cannot mend. McCoy, never satisfied with a case that he can simply do nothing for._*

He was not sure what he would do without McCoy there to distract him.

'That may be, Doctor,' he said aloud. 'However, I have noted that the *_healthy* _release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you.'

'Which just goes to prove that there's no such thing as a perfect solution,' Jim said in a lighter tone, sitting down next to him, trusting him not to lash out this time, believing that Spock's very primal Vulcan anger was now under control. Spock did not trust himself nearly so far as Kirk trusted him.

'So it would seem,' he said.

His voice was still hoarse, still reminding him undeniably of how Parmen had made him cry out, to gasp as if in pleasure, to ride with him as if he had been enjoying, _*enjoying_*, what Parmen had done to him. He trembled with the repressed anger that was battering to be released.

'Captain,' he said, still staring past his steepled fingers, still gaining very little calm from that posture.

'Yes, Spock,' Jim said.

'Do you still feel anger toward Parmen?' he asked, with an odd note of pleading in his voice. Pleading for company in his own misery, perhaps.

There was a pause, and then with a control that Spock envied in consideration of the bright, burning emotion he could feel from deep inside his captain, Jim said, 'Great anger.'

'And you, Doctor?' Spock asked.

'Yes, Spock,' McCoy said, with the same level of repressed emotion and careful control. 'And hatred.'

'Then you must release it, gentlemen,' Spock said. 'As I must master mine.'

Kirk looked at him them, as if in surprise that Spock could feel such anger and hatred. Surely he was allowed those reactions, in the face of what Parmen had done, to all of them?

'I might have seriously injured you, Captain, even killed you,' he continued in a low voice. With his own hatred, with his own anger, he had been so blindly consumed that he had not thought who he was hitting out at... 'They have evoked such great hatred in me,' he ground out. _*Steady. Control. Steady._* 'I cannot allow it to go further.'

He could not long keep his fingers in their imitation of the meditation posture.

He clenched them instead into a trembling ball, but that did not help either. He stood, and moved with great deliberation over to the small table that stood near his seat. His hand was shaking, itching with the primitive need to do violence to something or someone. He could kill, at the moment, with very little qualm. If Parmen had stepped into the room, he could have smashed his hollow, bitter, seething skull with one blow, and laughed to see him so reduced. Emotion was intoxicating.

'I must – master it,' he said in a trembling voice.

His hand lighted on a pottery vessel of ridiculous ornateness. It would do. It was as hollow and ridiculous as Parmen himself.

*_Remove the anger. Let the anger slip down into my hand. Let it inhabit my fingers. Condense it. Release it, safely, and be done with it…_*

'I must – control.'

He clenched his fist as if he was crushing Parmen's own skull in his grip, and the vessel shattered.

The irony was that neither Jim nor McCoy had expressed their anger in anything other than calm words. Spock, however, could feel the sharp pain of the crushed pottery in his hand, and see the splintered pieces of it on the floor. He was the one who had failed, emotionally.

Jim came close to him, made as if to touch him – and then, as if remembering how the Vulcan had struck out at him before in anger, he pulled away. But Spock was lost in a haze as he tried to crush and conquer the emotions that threatened to tear him apart. He dimly heard McCoy say suddenly;

'Jim, this is senseless. I've thought it over. I'm staying.'


	3. Part III

III.

Spock watched Jim and McCoy, dimly listening to them arguing. It was as he had said. His own release of emotion was proving very unhealthy for both of his friends. It had spurred nothing but anger and desperation in them. Kirk argued, McCoy argued, and Alexander's voice rose above them both, plaintive and miserable – and finally the noise of something smashing broke him out of his haze.

'Put it down,' Kirk was saying, and Spock's eyes snapped to what was happening, suddenly alert in case Alexander meant harm to the captain.

Alexander had broken one of the great, empty urns that decorated the room. He was holding a shard of it in his hand, threatening to kill Parmen even as Kirk used every skill he had learnt as a leader of people to persuade him back to sanity. This was what Spock's emotion had achieved. Alexander, desperate, suddenly fully aware of the misery that he had suffered for millennia, willing to commit murder to release his new found friends from a similar fate.

And somehow, by some ingenious human method, Kirk had talked Alexander out of his desperate, murderous anger, and he was sitting with him on the low bench that Spock had sat on, and Alexander was turning to him and saying, 'Anything I can do to help, you just tell me.'

'All right,' Jim said, perhaps scrabbling in his mind for the first thing he could think of to distract Alexander. 'Did the Platonians always have this power?'

'No, not until we came to this planet,' Alexander said.

Spock's interest peaked, lifting him out of his self-obsessed misery. He grabbed hold of that question as a lifeline. Science. A problem to solve. Something that he could cling to, and pretend that all was normal. He folded his arms across his chest, a last, illogical vestige of self-protection as he prepared to enter the discussion.

'Alexander,' he asked, a glimmer of a solution beginning to light in his mind. Finally, his voice was steady, almost normal. 'Is it possible for you to recall how long after you arrived here that their power began to develop?'

'How could I forget that?' he asked bitterly. 'It was exactly six months and fourteen days after we got here that they started pushing me around.'

'And would you know how many months' supplies you brought with you?' Spock asked gravely.

'Four, I think,' he said, his forehead furrowing in an attempt to remember. 'No – three.'

Spock was asking him to recall with precision the most mundane facts of thousand of years past. It was no wonder that he was uncertain.

'That's close enough, Alexander,' Spock said. 'Fascinating. Their power developed two or three months after they started eating the native foods.'

Alexander looked to Kirk and back to Spock in amazement.

'That's right!' he said.

'Then it is logical to assume that there is a connection between the psychokinetic power and the eating of the native foods,' Spock continued.

_*Logic. Cling to logic. Logic will soothe all pain._*

'Then why wouldn't Alexander have the same power as the others?' McCoy wondered, staring at him.

'Perhaps his system cannot absorb the crucial element,' Spock said, looking pointedly at the small man.

It was obvious that Alexander's stature was by no means normal for a Platonian. It was an indication of McCoy's own distraction that he wasn't immediately alert to what Spock had just seen.

'Bones, I think it'd be a good idea if you took a reading of Alexander's blood,' Kirk said brightly.

The whole tone in the room had lightened. Suddenly they had something to cling to, some sliver of hope that could drag their minds away from what had already happened.

'Not that I'm afraid or anything,' Alexander began nervously as McCoy crouched beside him, readying his tricorder, 'but will it hurt much?'

'You won't even know it happened,' McCoy said with his best bedside manner as he began the scan.

'You still have a tricorder reading of Parmen's blood, don't you?' Kirk asked.

'Of course,' McCoy nodded in realisation. 'Parmen possesses the highest order of psychokinetic ability, and Alexander the lowest, in the same environmental conditions.'

'The probabilities are that Alexander was born with some biochemical deficiency relative to Platonius,' Spock said.

'I'll run both their blood samples through for a full comparative test on the tricorder,' McCoy said eagerly.

'And if our theory works out, we've got a weapon,' Kirk added, looking up at Spock.

_*A weapon_,* Spock thought. Kirk was performing his duty in exemplary fashion. Spock, scientist, pacifist, had no greater wish than to link his two hands together in the most primitive form of mallet, and bring them down upon Parmen's simpering skull. Kirk, however, had blended Spock's science and McCoy's medicine, and deduced that with them could be formed a weapon of far greater subtlety than physical force.

McCoy studied the readings that were scrolling past on the tricorder's tiny display screen.

'The one significant difference between Parmen's blood and Alexander's is a concentration of kironide, broken down by pituitary hormone,' he said, as if clarity was finally dawning.

'Kironide!' Kirk said in realisation. He had heard of kironide being used in many different applications, from its addition to fuel, to being used as a preservative in certain paints and dyes. 'It's a high-energy source. That could be it.'

'The pituitary hormones confirm the hypothesis,' Spock nodded, his voice still lacking in tone despite the distraction of science. 'They also regulate body growth.'

'Oh, you mean the same thing that kept me from having the power made me a – dwarf?' Alexander asked with distaste.

'Yes,' Spock nodded. 'It's also obvious why Parmen kept this little utopia a secret. Anyone coming down here and remaining long enough would acquire the power.'

'Exactly,' Kirk nodded. 'McCoy,' he said, rising to approach the doctor. 'There must be a quick way of building up a concentration of kironide in our blood.'

'It'll take some doing,' McCoy nodded, 'but it is possible.

'What are we waiting for?' Kirk asked eagerly.

McCoy took his medical satchel over to the small table and withdrew two amber capsules from it. He held them up to the light, studying them, and then hesitated, looking suddenly doubtful. Spock watched him intently. So much relied on those two tiny vials.

'What is it, Bones?' Kirk asked in concern.

'Well, even if the kironide reaches the desired effect, it still may not help us get out of here,' he said doubtfully.

So much rested on their ability to defeat Parmen in one effort, before he realised what he could gain by removing McCoy's medical equipment from him. The doctor was not necessarily concerned for their lives – they were far more useful as servants or amusements for idle minds – but he was greatly concerned for Spock's sanity if events continued in the vein that they had so far.

'Yes,' Kirk mused. 'There are thirty eight of them.'

'The point is well taken,' Spock said. 'However, the psychokinetic power is not additive. If it were, considering the Platonians' hostile propensities, two or three of them would have combined forces centuries ago and deposed Parmen.'

'He's right,' Alexander said excitedly, rising from his seat. 'Do you know, Parmen says each has his own separate power frequency, because before when they've tried to combine their powers, and use them together, it never worked.

'I'm ready,' McCoy said, holding up the hypo and inspecting the amber liquid that sat so innocently in the capsule.

'Let's not any waste time,' Kirk said quickly. 'Give us double the concentration in Parmen's bloodstream.'

McCoy pressed the hypo into Kirk's arm and the drug hissed through his clothing and into the muscle and tissue beneath his skin.

'The time factor concerns me,' Spock said, unreactive as McCoy injected the kironide into his arm. 'It may take days or even weeks before there's enough build up from the kironide to be of any benefit to us.'

'Yes,' Kirk said doubtfully. Then he asked suddenly, 'What about Alexander?'

McCoy looked down at him, considering.

'Since the kironide's broken down and injected directly into his bloodstream, it should work on him as well as us,' he said eagerly. 'Better in fact, because he's acclimated.

Alexander looked horrified. 'Oh, no,' he said, skipping away from them as if they had proposed branding him. 'Not after what they've done to me.'

'Why not?' Kirk asked in bemusement. 'You could conceivably take Parmen's place and run the whole planet.'

'You think that's what I want?' Alexander asked incredulously. 'Become one of them? Become my own enemy? Just lie around like a big blob of nothing and have things *_done*_ for me? I want to move around for myself. If I'm going to laugh or cry, I want do it for myself. You can keep your precious power. All I ask is one thing,' he said with determination, moving forward again towards the captain. 'If you do make it out of here, take me with you. Just drop me any place they never heard of kironide or Platonius.'

'Alexander,' Kirk began, holding out his hand in an attempt to placate him, but as he spoke the noise of a transporter cut though his words, and they looked in astonishment as two female _Enterprise_ crewmembers materialised in the room.

'Nurse,' Kirk snapped, recognising the figure of Nurse Chapel. 'Lieutenant Uhura.'

Spock stared at them as the two women stood immobile, fighting to speak, a dread washing over him as he contemplated the only purpose for which he could imagine Parmen requiring them.

*_Not them,*_ he thought_. *Not those two, of all the women on the _Enterprise_. Surely I was enough…_*

But surely, he was not. His eyebrow rose as he realised that certainly, he was not. Parmen's taste obviously extended beyond torturing a couple of men from an alien ship.

The women turned as if they were marionettes, and marched from the room with frightening purpose in their movements.

Disgust was heavy in Kirk's voice as he said, 'I guess we weren't – sufficiently entertaining.'

He started forward after the two woman, Spock and McCoy following a moment after – but as they reached the doorway an invisible hand gripped at them, pulling them back again. Spock's chest clenched in apprehension, and he looked toward Kirk.

'It'll be fine,' Kirk said in a low voice, reading his first officer's very real fear. 'The kironide will start working soon.'

'Are you so certain, Captain?' Spock asked doubtfully.

'Jim!' McCoy said in a strangled voice, and Kirk looked sideways to see the doctor and Alexander being dragged away through another door.

'Are you so certain?' Spock repeated.

Kirk closed his eyes, concentrating hard, willing himself to break the invisible grip that was stopping his feet from moving. But nothing happened. He stood just as immobile as he had been a few seconds before.

'Ah, our ruler's favourite toys,' someone said in a grandiose, mocking voice, coming into the room behind them.

Kirk twisted his neck, furiously trying to see behind him, and caught a glimpse of Dioniyde, the dark haired Platonian, standing near the door. The hand gripping them relaxed suddenly, and both Kirk and Spock spun to face him.

'Ah, not so fast,' Dioniyde said with a wide smile, holding up a hand as Kirk lunged toward him.

The captain was immobilised again, and Dioniyde laughed casually at him.

'So eager! You'll be reintroduced to Parmen's glorious company soon enough,' he said. He tossed small pile of garments at Kirk's feet, saying in a suddenly hard tone, 'Strip off, and put that on. You too, elf-man,' he said, tossing another pile at Spock.

Spock bent slowly to pick up the meagre clothing, seeing some kind of turquoise garment, strapped sandals, and a laurel wreath identical to the one that he had been forced to wear earlier. Kirk was examining a similar pile, but for the fact that his garment was orange.

'Go on, boys,' Dioniyde said with a wide smile, standing with his arms folded across his chest in a casual pose, obviously enjoying his task. 'Don't make me do it for you. It will only be less dignified.'

Spock glanced at Kirk, and the captain nodded minutely. There was little sense in resisting. Spock began to remove his clothes, trying to suppress the useless, illogical tremor that had begun in his hands. Dioniyde stood watching, always smiling, and Spock felt the fury that Parmen had kindled in him swelling into a furnace in his chest again.

'Spock,' Kirk said under his breath, seeing the minute movements in the Vulcan's face that indicated his distress.

Spock glanced at him briefly, grateful for his attempt to reassure despite the fact that he was essentially helpless. He closed down his mind to the presence of Dioniyde, carefully removing his shirt, undershirt, boots, socks and uniform trousers as Kirk did the same. He shivered. The Platonians did not keep their mansion as warm as a Vulcan would prefer.

Dioniyde's voice broke into his concentration. He was watching them avidly, as if this was a private show just for him.

'Go on,' he said mockingly, his eyes lingering on their bodies. 'Everything. Parmen doesn't want any utilitarian traces of your ship left behind.'

Spock looked at him sharply, with a look in his eyes that mingled defiance and pain. Then, very deliberately, he donned what turned out to be an unpleasantly brief tunic, and cinched the belt around his waist, before slipping his black underpants down with trembling hands and putting them into the pile with his other clothing.

'That will have to satisfy you,' Kirk said in a hard voice, following Spock's example

His own tunic was even more revealing than Spock's but he was far less bothered by the exposure than the Vulcan obviously was.

Dioniyde tittered, mentally lifting and dropping Kirk's tunic skirt just to prove to him exactly who was in control. Spock closed his eyes, struggling against the churning anger inside, as he bent to strap the foolish, gold-strapped sandals about his legs. Dioniyde tittered again as he bent. The tunic was far to short to allow such movements. Spock straightened up in an instant, going to sit on the low stool to put the sandals on instead.

'And don't forget the garnish, boys,' Dioniyde said with his wide, mocking smile, causing the laurel wreaths to fly onto their heads with a flick of his wrist. 'Ah yes,' he said, surveying them critically. 'Yes, I think you'll do – although personally I'd see you put a bit more muscle on,' he said, eyeing Spock. 'And perhaps – yes, I'd have the captain put on a diet, I think.'

He laughed, and turned with a flounce to the door, beckoning behind him with a careless finger.

'Follow me, boys,' he said. 'Mustn't keep them waiting, must we?'

And Kirk and Spock felt the invisible string jerk at their waistlines, and followed him out into the corridor beyond.


	4. Part IV

IV.

'In there,' Dioniyde said, jerking his head towards a door partway down a long corridor. 'Go on, boys. You're our star performers.'

Spock and Kirk looked at each other. The tugging at their waists had ceased, and they were under their own control. But there was absolutely no point in resisting. With mutual assent they walked slowly towards the door. Dioniyde carried on walking, in absolute confidence, towards a door further down the corridor.

Despite himself, Spock hesitated. Kirk looked sideways at him. He was more concerned for the Vulcan than he was for himself. With greater reserves of privacy and dignity, already held together by not much more than willpower, Spock had far further to fall.

'We'll be all right,' he told the Vulcan in a low voice. 'The kironide will work. It _*will_* work.'

Spock glanced at him, but neither agreed with nor contradicted his statement. He was certain that, whatever lay through that door, the torment would be inflicted on the two women as well as him and Kirk, and that thought made his insides flinch in horror. But still, they were powerless…

He turned towards the door again, took in a deep breath, and walked forward. Kirk touched his arm, smiled, and fell into his proper place as starship captain, a pace or two ahead of his first officer.

They rounded the door, and Spock saw that his supposition was correct. Both Uhura and Nurse Chapel stood there in the vast chamber, looking bewildered and lost, robed in long, sumptuous dresses and elaborately coiffured, bejewelled and made-up.

'Are we ever glad to see you,' Christine said with deep feeling, clutching a hand to her chest as she rushed towards them.

Spock could only imagine what the women's robing had been like for them, considering their own, and how terrifying that would be with no prior knowledge of the Platonians' power or intentions. He found himself unable to look fully at Nurse Chapel, for a reason he could not quite comprehend. He felt as if as soon as his eyes met with hers she would be able to see everything that Parmen had done to him, and all that he feared might happen, and he very much did not want her to see that.

'We were forced in the transporter and beamed down,' Uhura added as she joined them. 'It was like becoming someone's puppet…'

Spock allowed himself a flitting glance at Nurse Chapel in her powder-blue finery, absorbing in an instant the translucent nature of her sleeves, the split in her top that reached far down to reveal the skin between her breasts, and the very deliberately applied Vulcan-tilted eyebrows and accentuating eyeshadow. It was obvious that she was meant as a partner to him, in some undisclosed capacity, which meant that Uhura, robed in pink and with her eyebrows still arched as a human's, must be meant for Kirk. Their outfits were even matched in colour.

'I thought I was sleepwalking,' Chapel said helplessly. 'I couldn't stop myself.'

Music filtered from somewhere, and they heard the unwelcome sound of Platonians, a large number of them, tittering lightly. Spock turned his head apprehensively. He was becoming sick of that sound. He did not trust himself to speak to either woman, for fear of betraying his own anxiety.

'Captain, what is it? What's going on?' Chapel asked anxiously, trying to see where the noise was coming from.

Kirk and Spock exchanged a glance. Neither of them wanted to tell the two what had gone on down here, and what their likely purpose in the room was.

Kirk's jaw worked as he tried to suppress his own fury about what was happening, and his own helplessness to do anything about it. There were four members of his crew trapped down here now, not including himself. The Platonians obviously had the power to increase that number any time they liked.

'Spock, do you feel any effect of the kironide shot?' he asked, walking across the room towards a table that was laden with fruit and goblets.

'I did experience a slight flush, Captain,' Spock said, still looking about the room warily. It was obvious that they were being watched.

'So did I,' Kirk said. 'Let's try a simple test,' he said, gesturing to the table. 'Concentrate on raising this plate of fruit.'

Spock closed his eyes, visualising the fruit in his mind and trying with all of his power to cause it to leave the table. It was like trying to move a muscle in a phantom limb that had never existed. He had no idea _*how_* to go about it.

'Nothing,' Kirk said bitterly.

Spock opened his eyes, despite the fact that he very much wanted to keep them closed, to deny the reality around him. They were helpless. They were still helpless. They would continue to be helpless. He was just as useless as he had felt as he had lain in the bath after Parmen's assault.

Tittering again, and random applause. They looked about again, and panels slid silently away from the wall behind them to reveal the Platonians, gathered together behind a low barrier, as if in a box at the theatre. Alexander, his face distorted with misery, sat at the fringe of the gathering, forced to perform a drum roll to open proceedings. McCoy, still in uniform, sat beside Parmen like a statue as the man rose to make his speech.

A chill ran through Spock's body as he turned to face the massed Platonians. Did they all know what Parmen had done to him? Had he boasted of it to them? If Parmen, ever the showman, was capable of that merely in front of his wife, what would he choose as a display of his power for his entire community?

'Fellow academicians,' Parmen proclaimed in grandiose fashion. 'Twenty five hundred years ago, a band of hearty vagabonds arrived on this barren, rough-hewn planet. There was a desperate hardship of backbreaking toil. And then a divine providence graced our genius and our dedication with the power of powers. And through it, our every need instantly materialised. We thereupon determined to form a utopian brotherhood. This night is indeed a festive occasion, for tonight, we welcome into that brotherhood its first new member.'

Kirk stepped forward at that, his anger only very thinly veiled below rigid self-control.

'Not yet, Parmen,' he said. 'You have to convince the doctor first.'

'They'll never do it, Jim,' McCoy said as Parmen regained his seat. He was leaning forward, as if every cell of his body wanted to be on the other side of the barrier, with his friends.

'Doctor, please,' Parmen said in mock annoyance. 'You have destroyed the festive mood of the ladies. We must recapture it at once. I know,' he said, his tone of voice clearly indicating that this was no spontaneous idea. 'What would be better than a serenade from the laughing spaceman?'

He clapped his hands, his jaw set with determination, and Spock suddenly found himself jerked across the room to kneel beside a low couch. Uhura and Chapel were dragged after him, thrown down into sitting positions on the couch, and Alexander began to pick out a tune on his lyre. Spock sat numbly, his hand on the cushions near Uhura's leg, almost unable to process what might happen next.

He opened his mouth, and began to sing.

Chapel stared at him in momentary astonishment. To Spock's relief Parmen had arranged him so that he was looking directly at neither woman, but he could see their expressions of pity and discomfort as the words continued to drift from his mouth. He took little notice of the lyrics, trying to draw himself into a state where he was aware of neither the women nor the audience on the other side of the room, but he absorbed enough to know that it was a song warning the women of the sexually predatory nature of men.

_*A preliminary,*_ he thought as the song left his mouth. _*Parmen's way is to build up from the innocuous to the brutal. This is merely a preliminary…_*

Misery seemed to seep around him. Both Uhura and Chapel appeared to be close to tears. Internally, he was close to joining them.

As the music ceased, and the song died from his throat, he realised that he was trembling. Applause reached his ears dimly, and he heard Parmen calling out, 'And now let the revels begin.'

He was pulled again, like a rag doll on strings, and found himself standing beside Jim, with Christine Chapel opposite him and Uhura opposite Kirk. In an elaborate series of movements Christine pulled him towards the couch, and his heart constricted as he was forced to kneel at the end as if in attendance to her. But then he was being tugged across to where Uhura lay, and then back again to Christine…

'Oh, how faithless and fickle,' Dioniyde said in his mocking voice.

'Make up your minds,' another one crowed into the room.

Spock was sat on the couch, facing Christine. She was being lifted towards him, her hands reaching up to his face. His eyes burned onto her as he tried to release the telekinetic grip that held both of them.

'I'm so ashamed,' she said, with tears in her voice.

He could feel her shame seeping around him, emanating from her mind. It clung to him, like damp fronds of weed catching and clinging in his mind. Her misery was overwhelming.

Her hand stroked at his neck in the tentative beginnings of foreplay. Her fingers seemed to burn him despite their coolness. _*Fear, shame, misery. Crawl away. Disappear._* He could barely tell if those were her emotions or his.

Horror swelled in him. _*Not again. Not again…_* He could still feel the pain between his buttocks, still feel the revulsion and disgust. _*Surely not again…_* But at least – Could he allow himself to feel this? Was it not terribly wrong? But he could not deny that the thought entered his mind – at least this made it less likely that it would be Parmen who would violate him this time. At least…

'Please make them stop,' she begged him.

Her voice blasted away any sense of relief that he had experienced. Oh, the trust she placed in him, the belief that he could _*do_* something about this, when that stinging pain that was still so fresh proved how very powerless he was. How selfish to wish this on her just to spare himself the pain of Parmen's rape. For a brief moment he wished himself back under the animalistic predation of Parmen, just to spare her from suffering it herself.

'We have tried,' he said, letting his regret and sincerity flood over into his voice.

'Please, please make them stop,' she begged him.

Oh, this begging was cruel. Her own deep, cutting, sobbing pain touched him far more than his own. He closed his eyes, tried again to break the grip upon both of them, but nothing changed. He could still feel the invisible hands gripping at him, and her hands still caressed his neck and face, sending shivers through him, touching the meld points on his face, flooding him with her emotion.

'I haven't the power,' he said, staring into her eyes, willing her to feel the depth of his regret. He was shaking with the effort to resist them, but all of his effort achieved nothing.

'I'm deeply sorry,' he said. He had never meant anything more in his life. 'We've failed you.'

'For so long I've wanted to be close to you,' she said brokenly, her fingers still toying with his ears and jawline and neck. 'Now all I want to do is crawl away and die.

She pulled him closer, pulling his head towards hers. He shuddered with the effort to resist.

_*Not like this. Not like this…_*

Misery wracked through him. His eyes were fixed on hers.

_*She is beautiful,_* he realised as he stared at her tear-stained face. *_She is beautiful. Please, not like this…_*

Their faces were millimetres away. Her tongue flickered at his lips. Like a snake… It tried to gain entry, and his lips were made to part, and her tongue thrust into his mouth, spiking crudely towards his throat, and his own tongue was poking blindly at hers. It was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous parody, a marionette's love-scene. He could feel the minute constrictions of the muscles of her mouth and throat as she fought against the control.

'Careful, Mr Spock,' Dioniyde's sneering voice called across the room. 'Too much love is dangerous.'

'Remember,' his friend chimed in. 'Cupid's arrow kills Vulcans.'

And laughter rippled about the room. Spock wanted to kill them. He wanted to break away and smash their bodies to pulp. His entire body was shaking with the effort to resist. The force of Parmen's control was pressing his lips so hard into his own teeth that he could taste blood inside his mouth. He could taste her breath, panting into his mouth, tiny whimpers of shame just audible to his ears. Her hands were straying under the edges of his tunic, but the tension in them was such that they were trembling. One of his hands caressed her neck. The other was reaching back, finding the slit in her skirt that reached almost to her hip, tracing her skin with his fingers.

He was jerked backwards, his lips finally breaking away from hers. She was shuddering, her eyes closed, the shaking wracking her entire body. He stared down at her, consumed with guilt.

And then he felt a twitching on the tunic that he wore, and a cold dread pushed away every other emotion. The only things holding his tunic together at the shoulders were soft toggles of twilled silk. They slipped undone of their own accord, letting the turquoise fabric tumble down to expose his chest to where the belt cinched around his waist. Her arms were lifted, her eyes forced open. Her hands strayed to his collarbones, teased through the dark hair across his pectorals and down the dark trail to his navel and below. One silver-tipped finger probed just under where his belt sat, teasing him with its intrusion.

Ripples of reaction ran through him, tightening muscles, causing him to shiver. Her fingers circled about a nipple, then closed on it cruelly, pinching it to hardness. The gasp he gave had nothing to do with the Platonians. He tried again to close his eyes, but they would not let him. He tried to shut his mind away from the physicality around him, but they would not let him. Her lips were sinking over his nipple, the belt was loosening. He could feel phantom hands slipping between his legs, seeking to arouse him. A moan escaped his lips, a mixture of abject distress and arousal. Whose hands were they? He wrenched his eyes briefly sideways before they regained control. He saw both Parmen and Philana watching him intently. It could have been either, or both, slipping their mental touch over his body.

Christine. He had to focus on Christine. It was unbearable, but it might be just a little less unbearable if he focussed only on her, forgot the mental intrusion of that crowd of voyeurs. How could he, though? How could he block out the dozens of mental prods and touches, the feelings like their tongues slipping through his mind, their words and laughter whispered in his ears, their sordid thoughts and desires seeping through his own?

His tunic was finally ripped away, so that he was sitting, naked and trembling, leaning towards her body. He could hear noises – Jim making grunts of fury that their tormentors were trying to repress. Uhura, whimpering. Christine, gasping as his hand moved, as it slipped up the softness of her thigh. McCoy, giving a shout of pure fury, then begging them, pleading with them, promising them his undying obeisance. McCoy, watching everything…

How could he endure this, with the knowledge of what Parmen had already done to him? This second violation, coming so soon after the first, and to force him to violate her simultaneously.

He was peeling her top aside with a trembling hand. His mouth was gaping open, descending clumsily on her breast, sucking it into his mouth. The hard bud of her nipple was rolled across his tongue, and she gasped and arched her back to thrust it further into his mouth. He could feel her heart racing beneath those soft mounds. His head lifted, one hand taking the place of his mouth on her breast as his other hand continued to move up between her thighs. His tongue flicked at her ear.

His hand had reached its destination now, stroking her, feeling clumsily through the folds of flesh there and spreading her wetness. A flood of scent rose to his nostrils. She moaned as he touched her, and he managed to move his lips, already close to her ear, to whisper again, 'I am sorry, Christine. I am so sorry…'

'No,' she murmured, her voice breathless and thready from the actions of his hand. 'It's not your fault. Please, remember that. Please remember that, Mr Spock. Not your fault. Oh – !'

His fumbling fingers had found it – had touched that hardness at the centre of her, and stroked over it, suddenly deft and certain in their purpose. Her mouth was open in a soundless gasp. Spock wrenched his eyes away from her, saw Parmen sitting there in silent malevolence, and in his fury he finally found his voice.

'Do it, Parmen,' he ground out against the Platonian's control. 'If you will force us to do this, then _*finish_* it.'

'Oh, so eager,' Parmen said with his mocking smile, looking to the revellers around him. 'Should we let the spaceman have what he wants? Or shall we tease him just a little longer?'

He heard a sudden snarl of furious defiance from his captain, and looked across instinctively, to see Kirk, utterly naked, veins straining throughout his body as he straddled Uhura, who lay askew across the couch, naked breasts heaving in effort and terror.

Spock tore his eyes away again, and fixed them back on Christine's. Her blue eyes looked straight into his brown ones, the fear obvious in them. But there was something else. What was it? Trust. It was trust she was giving him. She was focussing on him as if he was the only person in the room.

_*I have failed her…_* he thought.

'It will be all right,' she whispered, her hand caressing his neck again. He didn't know if that caress was controlled or voluntary. Her other hand had slipped down to his pelvis, where an artificially induced erection was straining towards her.

'It will be all right,' she whispered again.

Her cool fingers were curling around his shaft. Her hand gripped firmly, and moved up and down upon it.

_*Oh…_* Rarely felt sensations were coursing through his body._ *Oh, oh…_*

He fixed his eyes on hers again.

'I trust you,' he whispered, his voice lamentably unsteady as her hand continued to pump on him.

'I trust you,' he whispered again, as her hand guided his organ between her legs, into the wetness that was spread there, into the centre of it.

'I _*will not_* let them control,' he rasped, slipping, ahead of their control, with great care into her body. If he was to be forced to do this, he would at least spare her that ripping, brutal intrusion that Parmen had visited upon him.

The urge to weep was prickling at his eyes, but he ruthlessly pushed it away. He kept his eyes on her eyes, pupils riveted on her pupils. _*After what Parmen did…_* The memory came back in a flood of sensations, and he forced it away before it could overwhelm him.

His hands were cradling either side of her head. Lost in their voyeuristic lust, the Platonians' control was not so absolute. Each careful thrust of his hips was his own, coming just before he was pushed, at his own pace. The gentle placement of his fingertips on her face was his own. Into her mind he said, _*I am sorry, Christine._*

He felt her wordless, bewildered emotions. The chaos was almost unreadable. She was humiliated, terrified – and full of love. _*Love._* He let the emotion surround him, somehow holding him together enough to allow him to calm some of her misery. He felt the warm acceptance of her body and the touch of her hands, lightly, on his hips, and the softness of her breasts under his chest, and the length of his stomach coming to touch the length of hers each time he thrust into her. His ears rang with silence. He was aware of no one and nothing else. He gasped, letting orgasm spill through his being, and then collapsed, completely enervated, on top of her shivering body.


	5. Part V

V.

Spock lay still, feeling Christine panting beneath him as she desperately tried to recover her composure. His hands were still cradling her head, and he stroked very lightly at her hair, giving a more human reassurance and feeling it steady her slowly. He could feel coldness creeping through his body as sweat evaporated, reminding him inch by inch of his nakedness. He felt heavy and lifeless, and it took physical effort not to rest all of his weight onto the woman beneath him. But still – it was just her and him, alone in a bubble of unreality…

And then Philana's unpleasant voice cut into his oblivion.

'Parmen, let's get on with it.

'You are so impatient, my wife,' Parmen replied. 'Observe the doctor and learn. He's quite content to wait for the piece de resistance.'

_*Observe the doctor…_*

Spock had almost forgotten about McCoy, the unwilling spectator in those ranks of voyeurs. He opened his eyes, looking only at Christine as she lay beneath him, her elaborately coiffured hair disarranged, her striking black and white eyeshadow smudged beneath her carefully pencilled in Vulcan eyebrows. He would not let the rest of the world exist.

'Are you all right, Christine?' he asked, in a voice so low that only she could hear.

She opened her eyes, and he saw in their blue depths that same mixture of pain and trust and love that had been there before. She nodded minutely. He increased the pressure of his fingers on her face, just enough to give comfort – and then he found himself abruptly being jerked away from her, forced to stand upright beside the couch in his post-coital, flushed nudity, his strapped sandals still clinging ridiculously to his lower legs. He saw her dragging her crumpled gown back over her body even as Parmen relaxed his control enough to let him grab at his own tunic and pull it back over himself.

He realised as he tried to fasten the toggles at the shoulder just how much his hands were trembling. Kirk and Uhura were performing the same actions as he and Christine, desperately trying to redon their clothing. Kirk looked furious, and Uhura appeared to be attempting an almost Vulcan control. McCoy was staring at the opposite wall with a look of misery engraved on his face. The Platonians were simply staring at them all, with stupid, vacuous smiles on their faces, and the flushed look of ones who had been caught watching pornographic images. Spock's black eyes flickered over them, but he had ceased to see them as individual people any more. They were just a combined entity that he wished to destroy.

He focussed his mind on flexing that invisible, telekinetic muscle again, but nothing changed. He was exhausted from fighting Parmen's will. When the man gestured again to call a bench spread with mediaeval weapons and torture equipment into the room it was only Parmen's control of him that kept Spock's rage from breaking out into deadly action. What did they plan now? Who would the pain implicit in the presence of those objects be inflicted upon, and who would be forced to inflict it?

He found himself being dragged toward the bench. He pulled a poker from a brazier that was hot enough to burn his legs as he stood a foot away from it. Kirk picked up a long, cruel whip. Spock stared at the poker, held awkwardly in his hand, registering the glowing tip and the damage that it would do to human flesh. Kirk began to crack the whip, as if experimenting with its power. Kirk turned, and for a moment Spock thought the whip was going to come down on him – but no – Parmen forced them to turn back towards the women, pressuring them across the floor, step by step.

Spock pressed his lips together, tried with every ounce of strength left in his mind and body to resist the impulse that was making his legs move across the floor. He saw Christine sitting half-upright on the couch, beautiful in terror, her blue eyes wide and helpless. Sickness blossomed through the pit of his stomach. He could not, he _*could not_* be the instrument of this. What was he going to do? Brand her? Blind her? The vision of her streaked with ugly, red, shining burns that he had inflicted hovered in his mind like a ghost.

And then – the noise of a whip cracking shattered the taut, silent atmosphere, and Parmen's concentration snapped like a frayed elastic band. The energy that Spock had been channelling into resistance was released, and he spun to face the Platonians. _*Jim_*. It was Jim that had done this! Jim had brought the whip down – but towards _*Parmen_*, not towards his intended target of Uhura.

'You're half – dead, all of you!' Kirk ground out against Parmen's tenuous grip. 'You've been dead for centuries. We may disappear tomorrow, but at least we're living now, and you can't stand that, can you?'

A shadow of uncertainty crept into Parmen's eyes.

'You're half crazy because there's nothing inside,' Jim continued to rage. '*_Nothing_.* And you have to – torture *_us*_ to convince yourselves you're superior.'

His speech was beginning to stutter. He was losing control again… His face contorted with the effort. Parmen wrenched him around, back towards Uhura, and his arm rose, and he brought the whip down with a crack, again and again, only just missing the woman each time.

Spock found himself pressed closer to Christine again, against every struggle he made to resist. The red-hot tip of the poker inched nearer to her face, and she closed her eyes, silently and resolutely waiting for the pain to burn into her skin. His arm shook with the effort to wrench away from her, but Parmen's steady, cruel, relentless force urged him on.

Suddenly McCoy was desperately, recklessly making promises, pledging himself to Parmen's service. Spock knew that it was too late. Parmen no longer needed to convince McCoy of anything. He had them all under his control. He was doing this now purely to satisfy his own sadistic lusts.

'Parmen,' Philana said abruptly, with a note of anxiety in her voice.

'Alexander again,' Parmen said, keeping his voice falsely casual.

His rigid control slipped a little, allowing Spock and Kirk to turn back to stare at him. Alexander was there, caught in Philana's grip like a bizarre statue, leaning over the barrier and thrusting a knife towards Parmen's chest.

'He likes to play with knives,' Parmen continued. 'Very well, we shall indulge him.'

Alexander swivelled abruptly, until he was seated on the barrier, holding the knife in both hands above his head and bringing it down towards his own chest. The Platonians watched in glittering anticipation. Suddenly their show had become all the more interesting as one of their own became a victim of Parmen's cruelty. Alexander whimpered and struggled, but the movement of his hands was relentless.

Spock watched, disgusted by Parmen, fraught with concern for Alexander's life, and utterly helpless to move or act.

And then the knife twisted away, as if magnetised.

'Who did that?' Parmen snapped in an outraged tone.

Kirk laughed, the warmest sound that Spock had heard in a long time. The captain threw the whip down onto the floor with a flourish.

'_*I_* did,' he said with deep, heartfelt satisfaction. It was as if suddenly he had realised a truth that had been half-obscured all along, and the understanding of how to move objects with his mind was now as obvious to him as the power of speech or movement.

'Impossible!' one of the Platonians ejaculated.

'Quite possible,' Spock said with a similar tone of complete satisfaction. 'And – logical.'

He flung the poker aside in disgust, and it slid across the floor.

'What is this?' Dioniyde asked sharply, as if he had been done a great wrong.

'What's going on?' Philana chimed in, in bewilderment.

The idea of someone gaining power over _*them_* was obvious inconceivable to the assembled Platonians. They all appeared stunned by this human usurper who had stolen their power.

'Platonians, listen to me,' Kirk said in a tone of complete triumph. 'The next one of you that tries any trick will get hurt. Not only do we have your psychokinetic abilities, but at twice your power level.'

'Not twice mine!' Parmen said viciously.

And Alexander suddenly found himself being propelled forwards, holding the dagger out towards Kirk this time with deadly intent. And then he was twisting and turning in the centre of the room as Kirk and Parmen wrestled over him like children with a prized toy. And then suddenly he was back in front of Parmen again, holding the dagger at his chest again, still no more than an instrument of telekinetic control.

'Captain, no!' Parmen cried out in real fear – the kind of fear that he had not felt in two and a half millennia.

_*Now, does _*that_* make you feel alive?_* Spock wondered silently, watching the Platonian through narrowed eyes. _*Does having your own life put in imminent danger stimulate yours senses more than tormenting us?_*

He knew that without Vulcan discipline he would have the power to be very, _*very_* cruel to Parmen just to show him what being alive really meant. There was a reason why Vulcans practised strict emotional control.

'Captain! I beg of you, I'll do anything you say. I do not wish to die,' Parmen pleaded desperately, the knife inches from his throat. 'Captain – do you hear me?'

And Kirk deliberately twisted Alexander away from Parmen's throat.

'Don't stop me,' Alexander pleaded, hazed with the anger of hundreds of years of oppression. 'Let me finish him off...'

'Do you want to be like him?' Kirk asked softly, very aware of just how much like Parmen he himself had just been tempted to become.

Alexander hesitated, running his fingers over the cold, sharp blade in his hand as if trying to understand exactly what it meant. He looked at Parmen, flinching and cowering in fear, stripped of everything now that he was stripped of his power. He was nothing but a thin, ineffectual, old man.

Alexander dropped the knife on the floor, and Parmen's breath gasped out of him in relief.

The great leader of the Platonians found himself being dragged over the barrier and forced to his knees on the cold marble floor, panting in fear. Spock stared at him kneeling there. Was this the man that had held him in his iron grip, and raped him, and forced him to rape another? It was almost inconceivable…

Alexander towered over Parmen's kneeling form, standing above him on a bench, and spoke to him with disgust thick in his voice.

'Parmen, listen to me. I could have had your power, but I didn't *_want*_ it. I could have had your place right now – but the sight of you and your Academicians sickens me. Despite your brains, you're the most contemptible things that ever lived in this universe.'

Parmen clambered to his feet – but only because Kirk allowed him to. He approached the captain, fear still in his eyes.

'Captain, you knew that I intended to destroy both you and the Enterprise, yet you spared me,' he said in confusion.

'To us, killing is murder, even for revenge,' Kirk said in a tight voice.

Spock could only admire his captain's self-discipline. His own anger was rippling dangerously below the thin surface of his control. He could not bring himself to look straight at Parmen yet, partially for the memory of what he had done, and partially because he was certain that if he looked into his face he would not be able to restrain his need to rip the man's head from his body.

'But there will be other starships,' Kirk continued.

'There's no need for concern,' Parmen said quickly, almost tripping over his words in his haste to placate the captain. 'They'll be safe. Of late, I have begun to think that we've become bizarre and unproductive. We are existing merely to nourish our own power. It's time for some fresh air. We shall *_welcome*_ your interstellar visits.'

'I don't believe you,' Kirk said shortly.

'That would be highly uncharacteristic,' Spock said. Suddenly he found himself able to look at this weak, pathetic creature. A sense of superiority rose in his chest. 'We must expect, Parmen, that the moment we leave here, your fear would be gone and you would again be as sadistic and as arrogant as your twenty five hundred years have made you.'

'Just remember, we can recreate that power in a matter of hours, so don't try anything,' the captain warned him.

'Understood, Captain,' Parmen said quickly. He was falling over himself now to ingratiate himself to Kirk. 'And you're right, none of us can be trusted. Uncontrolled, power will turn even saints into savages, and we can all be counted upon to live down to our lowest impulses.'

'You're very good at making speeches, Parmen,' Kirk said in a disgusted tone. 'Just make sure that this one sinks in. Now move aside,' he said with a toss of his head, forcing Parmen to obey him with the strength of his will rather than the strength of any telekinetic ability. 'Alexander,' he called, beckoning the man to his side.

Choosing now to use his telekinesis to very useful effect, he summoned a communicator from Parmen's haul, and opened it with great satisfaction.

'Kirk to _Enterprise_,' he said into the grille. 'Mr Scott, prepare to beam us up. I have a little surprise for you. I'm bringing a visitor aboard.'

'A – visitor, sir?' Scott's voice asked through the device. 'Captain, do ye mean to say you've – resolved the situation down there? Lieutenant Uhura and Nurse Chapel were – '

Kirk turned around to the women behind him, sparing them a brief, guilty glance.

'They're safe,' he said in a more muted tone. 'And the situation is resolved, Mr Scott. Just give us a minute, will you?'

'Aye, sir,' Scott said, bewildered but trusting. 'Scott out.'

Spock turned himself to regard the women. They were sitting now on the same low couch, trying to cling to dignity, but Uhura's arm was around Chapel's shoulders, and neither of them were looking at anyone else in the room. Spock took a step towards them and, instinctively, Christine flinched. Spock froze, an expression of confusion lowering itself over his face, and then turned back to Kirk. He had no idea of how to deal with this situation. For Kirk, perhaps, it was easier. He was, at least, used to opening himself to many different women. He had openly flirted with Lieutenant Uhura in the past, and she with him. Not that that would make rape acceptable, but –

His insides flinched. No. He had no idea of how to deal with this situation…

******

It was an odd party that beamed up to the _Enterprise_ – Spock and Kirk still in their Platonian tunics, and Uhura and Chapel clutching their flimsy dresses about themselves, McCoy with a haunted expression on his face – and Alexander, the oddity, obviously concerned for the others, but buoyant with his freedom from the Platonians.

Kirk waved Scott's eager questions aside, and they walked out of the transporter room like a funeral cortège.

'Captain!' Scott protested, following them out of the room.

'Oh,' Kirk said distractedly. 'Mr Scott, this is Alexander,' he said, gesturing towards the small man. 'See to it that he's settled into guest quarters, and has everything that he needs. I'll – come see you later, Alexander. There's – rather a lot of ship's business that needs attending to.'

'First order of business being sickbay,' McCoy said firmly. 'All of you. I'm not letting anyone just wander back onto duty as if nothing has happened. And that's a medical order that supersedes yours, Captain,' he said pointedly, looking at Kirk.

Kirk closed his mouth over an unspoken protest. He glanced sideways at Spock. Back in the familiarity of the ship, the Vulcan seemed to have descended into a pale, trembling state of withdrawal again. Christine Chapel was on the verge of sobbing, and Uhura was pale with a mixture of anger and misery. He himself was still trembling on an adrenaline high, but he knew that at some point what had just happened was going to hit him hard.

'All right, Bones,' he nodded. 'Sickbay.' He glanced at Spock, and touched his arm. 'You too, Spock,' he said in a low voice. '_*Especially_* you.'

Spock glanced at him. He seemed to be searching for words, and then he said, 'Captain, there – is no need…'

'There is _*every_* need, Spock,' McCoy told him firmly. 'You need a physical exam. You might need treatment…'

Spock sensed rather than saw Chapel's eyes flicking to him, felt her spike of wonderment at what had been done to him before her arrival that would necessitate physical treatment. There was that concern again, and love, that was quickly swallowed in her own ballooning misery.

Telepathy was sometimes a blessing, and sometimes a curse. Spock did not regret using his mind to soothe her trauma on the planet below, but it had left him open to her mental impulses, at least until he could meditate to control the problem.

'Come on, Spock,' McCoy said in a low voice, touching his hand to his arm to break him out of his reverie. 'Sickbay's calling you.'


	6. Part VI

VI.

Spock sat in his quarters, lifting a book with his mind, placing it back on the shelf, lifting it again, placing it back, lifting it again. The kironide had started to affect him not long after beaming up from the planet, and it was already in full force in Kirk's bloodstream, but it was largely useless up here on the ship apart from as a distraction or temporary amusement.

Dr McCoy had enforced sick-leave on both him and Kirk, insisting that the rest extended until the effects of the kironide wore off. Spock knew that the kironide was not the sole reason for the leave. Uhura and Miss Chapel had been given similar time off.

He lifted the book again, this time lifting it higher, and higher, and higher, until it almost touched the ceiling. Then, in a sudden, uncontrolled burst of rage he brought it down, across, smashing into the opposite wall, and the book exploded into a blizzard of pages that whirled about his room like swarming butterflies and then drifted silently to the floor.

A moment of calm settled through his cabin. He battled with control. But then a vase shattered, and burst across the shelf like shards of coloured ice.

The ceremonial weapons upon his wall wrenched free of their moorings and flew across the room like darts, hitting the wall and clattering to the ground.

Spock sank his head to the desk and clenched his arms over the top of it, his hands shaking in the effort to keep the maelstrom of fury inside his own head. A Vulcan's rage was a dangerous thing in the most mundane of situations. With telekinetic power it was terrifying.

He straightened up, clenching his fists at his sides, rigidly controlling the emotion inside him. This was the fifth time in two days that he had been forced to set his quarters back in order after a similar outburst. He had already lost a pot-plant, two aged statuettes, a scientific model of DNA, various crockery, and thirteen books.

He used his mind to lift the torn pages of the book a foot off the floor. He folded them all into paper darts. He caused them to fly in intricate combination about his quarters, and come to rest neatly, hovering in formation in the air in front of him. Yes, logic and control were certainly better than raging anger. But so much harder to sustain, when the anger battered at him like a storming sea, smashing at his defences, crumbling them piece by piece.

The hovering darts abruptly incandesced and burst into a hundred points of flame, falling to the floor in a rain of ash. Spock leapt up from his chair and stumbled backwards against the cabin partition, his chest constricting with brief and very real fear, before his disciplines came into force. The fire alarm whooped on above his head, and Spock snapped, 'Computer, situation is resolved,' before sprinklers could come into force.

He regained his seat, trembling, as the door burst open.

'Spock, what the hell – ' Kirk began as he barrelled into the room, looking about Spock's quarters wildly for danger. 'The fire alarm – '

Spock gestured tiredly at the splayed, empty book cover, and the small flakes of ash over the desk and floor.

'I – did not realise that my powers extended to setting light to flammable objects,' he said.

Kirk looked about Spock's quarters more calmly this time, registering both the present destruction, and the gaps along the shelves and floor that indicted previous outbursts.

'Spock, have you been to McCoy about this?' he asked quietly.

Spock shook his head. 'What could he do, human as he is?'

'Human as he is?' Kirk repeated. 'Spock, am I right in thinking that it's not the kironide itself that's the problem – it's just that the kironide manifests your – emotions.'

Spock's head shot up at that, an eyebrow rising as if he had been deeply offended.

'Do you deny having _*any_* emotional reaction to what Parmen did to you, Spock?' Kirk asked pointedly.

Spock lowered his eyes towards the desk. He had an emotional reaction to Parmen's actions. He had an emotional reaction to the examination and treatment he had been forced to undergo in sickbay because of what Parmen had done, and to the pain that he still felt whenever he moved to remind him of it, and to the fact that Parmen was sitting there still as the lord of his planet, completely unpunished for his actions.

'My reactions – are _*my_* reactions,' he said quietly.

Kirk looked around Spock's quarters, at the damage that his reactions had wreaked, and raised his own eyebrows.

'Spock, I sat down last night with Lieutenant Uhura, on McCoy's advice, and talked with her about what happened,' he said quietly. 'It helped, a lot. It helped both of us. I think that things will be – strange – between us for a while, but it hasn't destroyed our friendship.'

Spock's eyes remained fixed on the desk, but a stylus that lay there began to turn in circles, seemingly of its own volition.

Finally, without looking up, he said, 'Parmen did not – rape you.'

'Not quite,' Kirk murmured.

Now Spock did look up, his eyes flashing with a rage that went to the very centre of his being.

'_*He did not rape you_,*' he said in a low, trembling voice. 'He caused you to engage in intercourse with a woman, as he caused me to engage in intercourse with – a woman. _*But he did not rape you._*'

Spock stood up, clenching his hands behind his back, twisting them furiously, and then bringing his arms back to fold them across his torso, and if he had no idea what to do with these useless appendages. He stalked into his bedroom and stood there behind the partition that separated the two rooms.

Kirk stood still, watching him through the grille between the rooms. Unseen, another of Spock's possessions exploded and scattered to the floor.

'Spock,' he said softly, after a minute had passed.

'Captain, it would be best for you to leave me,' Spock said flatly from behind the screen.

'Spock,' Kirk said more firmly, moving towards the other room.

Suddenly he found himself locked in place with a disturbingly familiar sensation of being gripped by invisible hands at every point of movement.

'_*Spock!_*' he said in a strained voice, and the grip on him suddenly loosened.

Spock turned sharply, and came to stand in front of him.

'Captain, I submit myself for arrest, on a charge of assaulting a superior officer,' he said in a grave, subdued voice. 'You will not need security. I will go to the brig myself.'

'Spock, I'm not going to arrest you,' Kirk said softly, almost with a laugh in his voice. 'I think I can excuse your actions as a result of extreme stress. Besides, you didn't exactly hurt me.'

'I could have, very easily,' Spock said in a low voice. 'Just like Parmen…'

'_*Not_* like Parmen,' Kirk said firmly. 'You stopped short of causing any harm. Not like Parmen.'

Spock turned away again, his hands twisting behind his back again.

'Spock, I'm sorry for what Parmen did to you,' Jim said softly, tentatively touching a hand to the Vulcan's shoulder. 'I'm truly sorry for that, as your captain and as your friend. I'm supposed to keep my people from harm…'

'You had no power,' Spock said, in a voice that was almost a whisper.

'No, I didn't,' Kirk acknowledged. 'And neither did you. No power. No blame. The only person to blame in this is Parmen, and his – evil, twisting mind. Spock, he did that to you to hurt you, and to convince McCoy. He was – a master of psychological analysis,' he said, reluctant to admit that Parmen could be master of anything. 'He knew exactly what buttons to push, all our weak points...'

'Is this supposed to help, Captain, to be told that I am weak?' Spock asked hollowly.

'Perhaps not,' Kirk said. 'But it might help to explain. And I'm not saying that you're weak. I'm saying that we all have those places where, if we're pushed, the surface will crumble through, and a sore place will be reached – a place so sore that it will continue to hurt long after the physical touch has gone away. You're right. Parmen didn't rape me, despite everything else he did to me, and I can't imagine what it must have been like for you to go through that. I couldn't help you then – and God knows how much I wanted to rip him off of you and tear his head from his body,' he added, with greater emotion pushing into his voice. 'But I couldn't. All I can do is offer to help you now.'

Spock exhaled, and moved past the captain to sit back down behind his desk.

'You and Dr McCoy and Alexander are the only ones on the ship who know of this,' he said.

'Yes,' Kirk nodded. 'And it's going to stay that way unless you choose to change it.'

'I – appreciate that, Captain,' he said.

Kirk stood regarding him for a moment, then went to the replicator, and came back with two cups of steaming liquid.

'Green tea for you, coffee for me,' he said, putting the cups down on the desk, and then seating himself opposite Spock. 'We drink, and we talk – or don't talk. Whatever you need, Spock. I will help you through this. We just need to work out how.'

******

Not talking seemed to suit Spock best at first. He exchanged a few halting sentences with Kirk about what had happened and how he felt, but the release of emotion and the attendant telekinetic fallout were too much to cope with. He tightened his control and tightened his bearing and his mouth and his mind, and attempted to continue about daily life.

Work was impossible – he was fully aware of that. Being in control of a starship whilst attempting to grapple with telekinetic abilities that he could neither control nor understand would be foolish at best, and a very real danger at worst.

In the absence of work Spock sat, and thought, and tried to restore order to his external and internal surroundings. He removed further breakables to storage, until his room was a stripped down version of its former self, with little more than fixtures and fittings and daily necessities around him. That suited him, at the moment. The less distraction the better. Easier to sit and to meditate and to try to process and understand the feelings that were raging about his mind.

Except that it was not easier. Meditation returned to that one conglomeration of sensation and pain and scent and sound that together made an unshakeable memory of Parmen's rape, and all of his prior and subsequent atrocities. He was trying to ignore the later events in his mind. That one incident was enough to deal with. Enough to think of…

Thankfully, without a regular input of kironide into his system, the telekinesis wore off within a week – but McCoy still insisted on another few days of absence from duty, _*just to be certain_,* he said. To be certain of what, Spock was not sure – whether it was to be sure that he would not explode something with his mind, or simply that he would not explode emotionally.

He felt, at the moment, like a glass vessel with a scattering of nitroglycerin nestling at its base. Every stimulus had to be carefully processed, and his emotional reaction to it scrutinised and nullified. Spock felt certain that at some point the nitroglycerin would explode – it was an almost scientific inevitability. He was a walking time-bomb, but the clock had been misplaced, and he could not see how many minutes or seconds were ticking away in red, bringing the pre-ordained explosion closer and closer to being…

******

The explosion finally gathered full force in the ship's gym. Earlier the place had been crowded, but the startled _Enterprise_ crewmembers had slipped away, one by one, in fear at the odd fury that the ship's First Officer was unleashing on one of the ship's punchbags. He was not wearing boxing gloves, and had gone no further towards changing into exercise clothing than simply taking off his blue top and putting it, neatly folded, onto a chair.

One of the final people to leave the gym called up sickbay with deferential uncertainty, and said, 'Dr McCoy. I don't know if it's a medical problem… I'm really not sure. But – Commander Spock's in the gym, sir.'

'Commander Spock's allowed to be in the gym, isn't he?' McCoy asked brusquely.

'Yes, sir, but – He doesn't seem right, sir. He seems – _*angry._*'

McCoy put his coffee down, and pondered. Probably nothing. Probably just an ensign mistaking Vulcan precision and efficiency for emotional input. But there was no harm in checking it out.

He entered a gym that was abnormally silent, except for the persistent, rhythmical sound of something being hit, over and over. He went through into one of the smaller chambers, and there he saw the incredible sight of Spock, _*sweating,_* punching a punchbag with bare fists, his body trembling with the effort.. The bag had split under the force of his blows, spilling its stuffing out in marshmallow lumps, and Spock was still hitting, over and over, with a deadly determination in his eyes.

'Spock,' McCoy said gently.

The Vulcan did not react.

'_*Spock,_*' he said, louder.

Spock gasped in a ragged breath as he registered the doctor's presence, and turned to him, his eyes strangely gleaming, his cheeks flushed with blood.

'Spock, er – I think you got it,' McCoy said cautiously. 'That punchbag isn't any longer for this world.'

Spock stared at him, panting, trying to recover his breath. McCoy lifted one of his trembling hands, and before Spock pulled away he saw that the Vulcan had not come out of the fight uninjured. The skin on his knuckles was bruised and split, green blood smearing over his fingers.

'Doctor,' he said finally through shuddering breaths.

He stepped backwards unsteadily, head bowed, until he stumbled into a chair at the side of the room.

'I – cannot control the anger…' he said. 'I think I need – psychological assistance.'

'I can schedule you some time with Dr M'Benga,' McCoy offered. He had already proposed that solution to the Vulcan, and it had been roundly rejected. 'Or I could try to find a slot with a practising psychiatrist on the next starbase we come to.'

Spock shook his head emphatically.

'No, Doctor,' he said, as expected. 'I will not discuss this with strangers. _*You_* are perfectly adequate.'

McCoy looked at him, momentarily touched by the Vulcan's trust in him. But he shook his head.

Spock, I can't help you,' he said heavily.

'Doctor, I am _*asking_* you for help,' Spock said with a low, taut tremor in his voice.

'I can't help you, goddammit,' McCoy said, his misery manifesting itself as anger. He absolutely hated having to turn a patient away – especially when that patient was Spock, who so rarely asked for help. 'I was there, Spock. I saw it happen, both times. I'm emotionally involved, dammit!'

'*_I*_ am emotionally involved, damn it,' Spock almost shouted, with very real anger. 'I *_cannot*_ go to another doctor. I _*need_* your help. Do not make me beg!'

'*_Spock_,*' McCoy said with emotion. 'Damn it, Spock, I _*hate_* Parmen for what he did. For what he did to you and Jim, and both of those women. I hate him for the fact that he forced me to sit there and watch, and never once touched a hair on my head. I hate him to the very depths of my soul. And I cannot – _*cannot_* – discuss this with you in any professional capacity. It's unconscionable.'

Spock sighed, looking at the doctor, inwardly admiring his adherence to his medical duty despite the pain that it caused him.

'Dr McCoy, is it beyond your capacity to discuss this with me as a friend?' he asked softly. 'I am as much in need of my friends as I am in need of professional assistance.'

Finally, McCoy smiled.

'Let me give those hands some professional assistance,' he said. 'Then we can go round to my quarters, or yours, and I'll do what I can in a personal capacity. How about that?'

Spock nodded slowly.

'That would be acceptable, Doctor.'

******

At first it seemed that McCoy's answer to Spock's problem was to douse it in a very large amount of alcohol, but Spock gradually discovered that the alcohol only served to relax the tension that was vibrating through his body and to help loosen the inhibition that surrounded the idea of talking about his experiences on Platonius. Despite his blank refusal to discuss the situation with Spock in a medical context, and despite the very unprofessional surroundings of alcohol and McCoy's quarters, the doctor could not help bringing his professional expertise to bear.

'Spock, I'm not a Vulcan psychologist,' he began, then raised his hand as Spock opened his mouth, saying, 'And don't tell me Vulcans don't have psychologists. You may not call them by that name, but you sure as hell do have them.'

Spock nodded, raising an eyebrow a small amount in acknowledgement of McCoy's point. He took another sip of the burningly strong alcohol, and waited for McCoy to continue.

'My point being,' the doctor continued, 'Spock, you're saying an awful lot about what Parmen did to you – but you haven't said a word about what happened between you and Christine Chapel.'

Spock closed his eyes, tightening his hand around his glass.

'What happened between me and Miss Chapel,' he began slowly, 'is a very different thing to what Parmen – inflicted upon me.'

'No one's saying it isn't,' McCoy said gently. 'But, Spock, he forced you to rape her. Doesn't that – disturb you at all? Don't you feel guilty?'

Spock opened his eyes sharply, snapping his gaze to the doctor's face.

'Guilty?' he repeated slowly, a dangerous edge to his voice.

'Yes. _*Guilty_,*' McCoy said pointedly. 'Furious at Parmen for inflicting that on both of you, and guilty as hell for being the instrument of his sadism. Not because you _*should_* feel guilty, but because it's natural to feel guilty. Most people take sexual intercourse as an act done _*by_* the male _*to_* the female. You were both coerced by Parmen – but it's quite natural that you should feel as if _*you_* were the aggressor.'

Spock's eyes closed again, and he sat in silence.

'I'll take that as a yes,' McCoy said after a minute of silence.

Spock opened his eyes again, his gaze burning onto the doctor's face.

'Yes,' he said very deliberately. 'Yes, Doctor. I feel guilty. I – understand – what it is to have someone do – *_that_* – to you, against your will.'

'Spock, do you think that she feels towards you as you do towards Parmen?' the doctor asked curiously.

Spock's right eyebrow twitched.

'How can she feel other?'

'_*Easily_,*' McCoy said firmly. 'It was a very, very different situation, Spock. Yes, both incidents were a result of Parmen's sadism, but you were raped by a man who wanted only to hurt you, to punish you. He was using intercourse as a weapon, using it purely as something to cause you pain in the most effective way he could think of. For Christine – at least, as far as I can intuit – yes, it was horrifying, it was humiliating. Yes, it was forced intercourse. But she knows you, and cares for you, very much, and knew that it was as much forced for you as it was for her. She _*doesn't blame you,_* Spock,' he said firmly. 'All she needs to know is that this hasn't destroyed any relationship the two of you ever had. That's what's really hurting her at the moment. That's why she hasn't been out of her quarters in a week.'

Spock looked up sharply at that.

'She has not left her room – in a week?' he repeated.

McCoy shook his head. 'Not for a moment. I've been to see her, and I think Uhura's been there. They've helped each other, a lot. But she hasn't set foot outside her door.'

Spock stared into the translucent brown liquid in the glass that he held. The logic of the situation was disturbing. He was quite unfit for duty. By all accounts the ship's head nurse was also unfit for duty. It seemed that the ship's captain and its chief communications officer had somehow worked out an equitable solution to the problem between them. Between themselves they had managed to restore a sense of equilibrium, and apply themselves to their jobs.

'Your prescription for my problem – is that I talk to Miss Chapel?' he asked, raising his head.

McCoy shook his head with a wry smile. 'Not my prescription, Spock. Like I said, I'm not qualified to give out any professional advice in this matter. But as your friend – yes, I said it would do you both a power of good.'

'And my – feelings – towards Parmen, towards what Parmen did?'

McCoy shook his head again. 'It hasn't been that long since it happened. You refuse to talk to a professional about it – and that's your choice. But that means it's in your hands, Spock.'

'You mean – there is no remedy,' Spock said slowly.

'I mean nothing of the kind,' the doctor said firmly. 'I mean you have to make your own remedy. Time, Spock. Time, and your own peculiar brand of self-scrutiny, and – perhaps talking to Christine will help with that, too.'

Spock's eyebrow rose again as he fell back to his silent observation of the drink in his hands. Talking… Talking, and introspection, in order to cope with a physical event. It was not an unnatural solution. It was not an unVulcan solution. It might, in fact, be an equitable solution. And if he could restore both the ship's First Officer and the ship's Head Nurse to duty, it might also be an efficient one.


	7. Part VII

VII.

Spock hesitated just down the corridor from Christine Chapel's quarters. He had been haunting that portion of the corridor for days, it seemed, his emotions in regard to the nurse and their experiences on Platonius winding and unwinding like a clock spring. If he had been observed, perhaps the crew of the _Enterprise_ would have come to the conclusion that he was stalking her. But he was not observed. He took special care to only approach her quarters at times when domestic areas of the ship were particularly quiet. If someone approached, he swiftly feigned a task in the vicinity, or strode off to another area.

So far he had failed to touch the buzzer at her door on fifteen separate occasions. The waste of time and energy was most illogical. His inability to raise his hand and touch a finger to a button was most illogical. The tight, tense knot that sat heavy and unmoveable in his stomach was most illogical.

This time, however, the fates decided for him, at least to a point. She had not left her quarters for many days. This he had confirmed with his own investigations. Today, however, was the exception to the rule. Whether it was for an appointment in sickbay, or a necessary excursion, or simply a whim, Christine Chapel had evidently, eventually, left her room. When Spock heard footsteps he moved swiftly into an access alcove and busied himself with a panel there. She certainly did not recognise him. But he, with senses heightened by nervousness and a greater awareness of her body taught ruthlessly to him on Platonius, caught an awareness of her as she moved past him. He turned to see her walking briskly towards her own door, her arms folded about her body as if she was still trying to protect herself from an indefinable threat.

Spock could not have described what impulse forced him to follow. It certainly was not a logical instruction from rational mind to body. Perhaps it was an unrealised desperation spurring him into action when no other more conscious part of his mind would allow it. But he followed her all the same, silent as only a Vulcan could be. He slipped in after her as the door shut without so much as speaking to her, let alone asking permission.

Feeling his presence behind her, Christine turned with a small, instinctive cry, tightening her arms across her chest. Her lips parted, but she couldn't think of what to say in response to the Vulcan's sudden, uncharacteristic intrusion into her private quarters.

'Kiss me,' Spock said raggedly, stepping forward towards her.

She stared at him, momentarily bewildered. She had thought that he would never want to look at her again, let alone engage in any acts of intimacy. Her rooms suddenly seemed half the size that they had before.

He looked haunted. He looked as if he had not slept in years. He looked like she felt.

'Kiss me,' he repeated. 'I need – something – to erase that other kiss.'

That other kiss had been a doll's kiss, had been rubber pressing against rubber, lips forced against lips by another's will. It had been the most terrible moment of her life.

No.

That was not true. It had been the beginning of the most terrible moment of her life. It had, by all accounts, been the continuation of the worst day that Spock had ever suffered.

'I – don't know if – ' she stammered. 'I mean, for either of us, it would be – '

A moment of rage flickered in Spock's eyes, before he clamped down ruthlessly on that particular emotion.

'I need – to see you as something other than Parmen's automaton,' he said in a low, controlled voice. 'I need to know that you, at least, are free of his control.'

He took a step forward, and she took a stumbling step back, unable to control the sudden fear that burst in her chest.

'Please,' she faltered, holding up her hands in front of herself in a useless gesture of self-defence.

Spock turned away abruptly, something in him appearing to deflate. If he had seemed tired before, now he looked utterly exhausted.

'How can you forgive me?' he asked, turning back to her.

His face looked – curiously naked. He had dropped all defence, all attempt at dignity.

'Spock,' she said softly.

She put her hand to the back of his neck, deliberately mimicking her action – _*Parmen's_* action – on Platonius. But this time her fingers were soft and relaxed. Her fingertips brushed his skin with the lightest of touches, coaxing him, not dragging him to her. Her lips touched his in a rose-petal kiss, the kiss of an intimate friend imparting a gentle reassurance of love, not the pornographic clinch that had been forced on them before. After the tiniest of hesitations, his lips moved under hers, returning that smallest, most gentle of kisses.

She drew away, her eyes closed. When she opened them she was startled to see that he was still standing there with his eyelids shut. A tear was garnering momentum at the corner of one eye, gathering the strength to fall.

'Spock,' she said again, touching her fingertips to his cheek, drawing the wetness away in an echo of an action he had once performed on her. 'It's all right. I know that it was all Parmen. It wasn't you. It wasn't your fault.'

He opened his eyes.

'We can get over it,' she said, suddenly finding her own pain easier to manage in the face of his. 'And whatever he did to you before I was beamed down – '

'He raped me,' Spock said starkly, the words coming from somewhere beyond his conscious control. 'Parmen – raped me…'

The words seemed to echo in his ears. They sounded cold and hateful and without pity, just as the act itself had been. In her mind she saw a flash of him pinned by that sadistic man, without the power to resist, without the hope of mercy, Parmen's face set in grim, determined triumph.

'Oh, Spock…' she said, pouring her own empathy onto the coldness of his words.

A valve seemed to have opened somewhere inside of him, letting deeper, more fluid emotions pour through and over the hot, dry anger that had been consuming him. Christine put her arms about his neck, drawing him to her, holding him steadily and firmly as he shook.

'I didn't know…' she said finally.

'Only those present knew,' he answered, with his eyes closed and his face against the side of her head. _*Those present…_* He shuddered. Kirk, McCoy, Alexander, Philana, all standing there, all watching as he knelt there…

'You've had treatment?' she asked, her medical instincts coming to the fore.

He nodded, and with that nod she knew a little, now, of who had witnessed the event.

'Christine, I am sorry,' he said in a low voice. 'I know what you suffered…'

'_*No!_*' she said fiercely. 'No, Spock. You didn't rape me. You shielded me from them, you sheltered me. You were gentle and – and – You stopped _*them_* from getting into my mind,' she faltered.

'You have been locked away ever since we returned,' Spock began.

'I thought that you must hate me,' she said, tears beginning to come into her own eyes. 'I thought – the only reason why they brought me down was because of my feelings for you, and those feelings betrayed you. They – _*used_* me to hurt you…'

'Christine,' Spock said in a startled voice, drawing away from her so that he could look into her eyes. 'Have you asked yourself _*why,*_ of all of the female complement of the _Enterprise_, the Platonians chose to bring down _*you,_* for me, and Lieutenant Uhura, for Captain Kirk?'

She shook her head in bewilderment. 'I just thought – because of how I felt…'

'I suspected from the start that there was some element of telepathy caught up in the Platonians' telekinesis. Not strong telepathy, Christine. Not the type of telepathy that could scan over four hundred minds on the _Enterprise_ and pick out one person on board who had feelings for me – but the kind of telepathy that could seek and pick through _*one_* mind, very close, under their complete control, to find the person who would cause greatest consternation as a choice of partner.'

'Greatest consternation,' she echoed. 'That isn't exactly a compliment, Mr Spock.'

Spock's eyebrow rose.

'Do you believe that they sought in the captain's mind, and chose Nyota Uhura as the woman he most despised, the woman towards whom he had least inclination? Or do you believe that they chose her as one of his close workplace companions, one towards whom he harbours a latent attraction – an attraction that he cannot act on because of that close working relationship?'

His eyes rested on her, boring into hers, relentlessly awaiting an answer. She blinked, and looked away. Few humans could sustain Vulcan eye contact.

'Why do you believe they chose _*you_* from my mind?' he asked, touching his fingers to her jaw, turning her head gently back to him. 'Why do you believe that you were in my mind to be chosen? Is it possible that the Platonians are better judges of the thoughts and impulses in my mind than I am myself?'

She writhed almost imperceptibly, bothered by the idea of crediting the Platonians with anything of benefit.

'Christine,' he continued. 'Dr McCoy believed that I was avoiding talking of what happened between you and me. That I was focussing exclusively on my rape by Parmen in order to – shut out – the later incident. He suggested that I come to you, and talk to you, for the health and sanity of both of us. Do you believe that he was correct?'

She turned slightly, looking towards the low couch at the side of her room.

'Maybe we should find out,' she said.

******

After a long time of sitting in silence, Spock said quietly, 'Does this really fit the good doctor's definition of talking?'

Christine flashed him a wan smile.

'Do you know what to say?' she asked.

Spock opened his mouth briefly, then shook his head.

'No,' he admitted. 'No, I have no frame of reference for such a conversation. I have no frame of reference for anything that happened to us on Platonius. For anything of – Parmen's doing.'

His voice trembled as he mentioned the man's name, and Christine looked at him.

'The thought of him makes you angry,' she said.

Spock clenched and unclenched his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead of him at the partition between this room and Christine's bedroom, letting the mathematical certainty of the octagons in the grille soothe his mind. There, at least, was something dependable. Symmetry, angles that could not alter, proportions that would always stay the same…

'Yes,' he said eventually. 'The thought of him makes me angry. The thought of him sitting at the centre of his small kingdom, unpunished…'

She looked at him curiously.

'How would you punish him?' she asked, certain that Spock's solution to Parmen would have little to do with revered Vulcan methods of logic in justice. 'What would you do to him if he was there in front of you, completely within your power?'

Spock's eyes narrowed, his fingers flexing, imagining tightening his hands around Parmen's throat until blood leaked from his eyes. Tal shaya would be too swift for him. Too merciful. He could feel him again, in him, over his body, controlling every muscle. He could feel Parmen's naked flesh slapping against his buttocks, his thin fingers clawing into his hips, thrusting into him without mercy…

He moaned, pressing his hands over his face, desperately trying to shut out the feelings of what had happened, and the overwhelming urge to forget everything he had ever learnt and kill Parmen slowly and with great pain.

Christine's hand on his shoulder brought him back to reality.

'You can't let it destroy you,' she said softly. 'You can't let what he did to you destroy everything that you are. This isn't you…'

After a long moment of silence she continued, 'What would they tell you to do, on Vulcan? How would they tell you to deal with this?'

Spock closed his eyes.

'Rape is almost unprecedented on Vulcan. It is barely spoken of. When it occurs, it is usually as a result of an unbonded male, in the throes of – his time. It happens to females. It is not inflicted upon males, by males…'

'Never?' she asked incredulously. 'Male rape _*never_* happens?'

Spock shook his head bleakly. He had always been unique on Vulcan, but he had not expected this to become another facet of his uniqueness.

'I – have never heard of an instance… I had never imagined…'

She stared at him. 'You didn't know it could happen?' she asked him.

'I knew,' he said in a low voice. 'But – not to me…'

'No,' she said slowly. 'Things like that… You never imagine them happening to you…'

He looked at her suddenly.

'I am sorry, Christine,' he said, with as much feeling as he could allow. 'I am truly sorry.'

She smiled a sad smile again, opening her arms to embrace him as he sat on the sofa. Spock didn't resist the invitation to touch – in fact he seemed glad of the offered reassurance, and leant forward into her arms.

'Mr Spock,' she said softly into his ear. 'I can't pretend that anything that happened on Platonius was good – but I rather a thousand times that I would be forced with you than forced with _*him_*.'

'That – is a compliment?' Spock asked uncertainly.

She smiled. 'In a way,' she said. 'You – made it easy for me, Spock. You protected me from them. You made me feel as if you were the only other person in that room. It's – not how I would have chosen for something like that to happen between us – but it could have been a thousand times worse…'

Spock nodded.

'I thought them to be cruel in the extreme when they placed me together with you for their charade,' he said. 'But I cannot think of another female on the ship that could have responded with your grace and dignity, Christine. I can look into your face with only a margin of – shame.'

'You don't need to feel any shame,' she promised him, stroking a hand over his dark hair. 'There was nothing you could have done. When I look at you, all I feel is pride in your strength and your courage.'

Spock exhaled. 'When I look at myself, all I can think of is what Parmen did…'

'Spock,' she said softly, drawing back from the embrace just far enough so that she could stare into his eyes. '_*You_* are not what Parmen did. He didn't make you anew with that act. And if he did,' she said, staring into his eyes and refusing to flinch from the pain there, 'let me remake you.'


End file.
